TIMELINE

Speed Suspects, founded by Joshua Shafighi in 2013 is an automotive community created in Los Angeles with a mission of bringing the world closer together.

1997 - Joshua Shafighi was born on June 18, 1997 in Los Angeles. He was exposed to motorsports at a very young age. His grandfather was a mechanic for over 50 years, his father has been operating car dealerships for over 30 years and his uncle's were Moto GP and F1 fanatics. 

2013 - Speed Suspects was created on December 28, 2013 during winter break of Joshua's junior year of high school. Attempting to find something to do during this downtime, he purchased a camera and started running around Los Angeles to hunt down cars to snap photos of and post on Instagram.

2014 - Just shy of Joshua's 17th birthday, with the help of his mom and weekend job at dominoes pizza he was able to obtain his first car, a 2011 Dodge Charger R/T. 

He named his car Crystal and she quickly became his best friend. They would travel around Los Angeles, navigate through all the best canyons in Malibu, attend car meets, and experience drives with local car clubs. 

This milestone allowed him to start exploring the Los Angeles car scene independently and sharpen his photography skills.

2015 -  After two years of car spotting, setting up photoshoots and sharing his work on Instagram he finally reached 100k followers on Instagram and got his first taste of success. This year was the beginning of a new chapter for Joshua. He had just graduated High School, sold Crystal due to old age, purchased a Mercedes C63 and was now planning his next moves.

With all the connections Joshua made from his endeavors, he now started bringing people together by producing his own events.

Almost every weekend, he would gather a group together from Super Car Sunday in Woodland Hills, travel up to "The Snake" on Mulholland drive blasting through the canyons in a group filled with sport and exotic vehicles then end up in Malibu for photos and lunch.

He started to build many friendships through his passion and started looking at cars and this culture from a different perspective. Joshua realized that this passion had the power to bring people together from many different backgrounds and age groups and allow them to connect with each other in a way that he had never seen before.

2016 - While continuing to create these experiences, Joshua took his content to the next level by scheduling shoots with cars that were almost impossible to get a hold of and placing them in the most beautiful environments the West Coast has to offer.

His images started trending on Instagram, getting re-shares from the biggest automotive pages and Speed Suspects continued to rise in popularity.

2017 - Up until this point Speed Suspects was seen as nothing more then a hobby for Joshua, but as his grades in college started to drop and pressure from his parents on his future started to rise, he felt that he needed to now turn this passion into a business venture. In the beginning of 2017 he launched speedsuspects.com, an automotive content creation and social media management agency. Quickly after launching he felt like he needed to improve his marketing abilities and closed his agency just after 3 months of operating. This marked the beginning of the first big challenge for Joshua on the future of Speed Suspects.

Seeing his peers reach millions of followers using growth hack techniques, he felt like he needed to step up his game or Speed Suspects would fade out. 285k followers on Instagram may be a lot to most people, but to Joshua it wasn't enough. He was at a point in his life, where he began to fail classes as a result of being obsessive over trying to figure out how to reach the million follower mark. In his mind it was hit one million users or give up the plans he had in mind to make Speed Suspects a global lifestyle brand.

It was October of 2017 when he finally cracked Instagram's algorithm and discovered how to show up on it's explorer feed in almost every post. This discovery skyrocketed the growth of Speed Suspects resulting in millions of weekly views.

2018 - Speed Suspects finally reached one million followers on June 10, 2018 after 5 years of chasing this milestone. From October of 2017 to June of 2018, Speed Suspects generated over 1 billion organic impressions, went from 285k followers to 1 million, obtained global recognition, a celebrity following and solidified it's name as a real competitor in the automotive media space.

2019 - Joshua began to shift Speed Suspects outside of the automotive community and integrate it into other popular cultures like music and fashion. 

2020 - Marks the rebirth of Speed Suspects with a redefined mission and purpose, from the word's of Joshua Shafighi, this is his mission and what it means to be a part of Speed Suspects,

"I want to inspire people through Speed Suspects to show them that anything is possible. I want to encourage them that there is much more than what is around you, that the world is much bigger than the places you’ve been to and where you grew up. Our vehicles allows us to travel to places we’ve never been before and meet people we never thought we would ever come in contact with.

These experiences allow us to see the world from new perspectives and have the ability to open up our minds and souls propelling us into a new way of living that we never thought was possible. To be part of Speed Suspects, means that you love new adventures, you take risks that excite you, chase your dreams and most importantly support and encourage those around you. 

We are all racing on this journey of life together and are fighting battles that nobody knows about. But by being part of this community, just know that you are not alone, we are all in this together and we are all one. We are all Speed Suspects."

 

THE STORY CONTINUES ...